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I really hope that same type of open-source economic irrationality will help fund my open-source FPGA tools startup!

my point is that there are a dirth of FPGA boards with better cost/performance value that could be used to prototype a graphics rendering FPGA system. Physical hardware isn't the limiting factor to an open source graphics card; the open source FPGA 3-D rendering code is the real missing piece. In fact, making a board was probably a distraction for this project because by the time the firmware is ready for real graphics workloads the FPGA on-board will be obsolete.

Here's some examples of 3-D engines for FPGA from the 6.111 lab at MIT:
3-D Pong (using rasterization):
http://web.mit.edu/6.111/www/s2006/PROJECT/7/main.html

Ray Tracing:
http://web.mit.edu/6.111/www/s2007/PROJECTS/5/main.html

There are hundreds of videos and code for FPGA projects up at http://web.mit.edu/6.111 (see project appendices for code).

This came out of MIT a while ago, and it was called "Urine Control" (You're in control). http://web.media.mit.edu/~hayes/mas863/urinecontrol.html

Yes. ...
Here is the list of free software regarding databases: http://directory.fsf.org/category/db/, but...
A flat file in a unix file system is already a "Database", as long as you have a text editor, (an emacs exists for w32 @ http://www.cygwin.com./ if a file contains data, it is a database. the only thing particular to more official databases is that these files are always interpreted using the same structure of rows and columns, and indexes are created and maintained, and more complicated bells and whistles added, but
-This can be completely done with shell scripts(bash is also available for winbloze fm w/in cygwin).
-Or, emacs has a planner.el program that keeps and organizes flat files of data in ways that would satisfy your needs.
-There is an emacs wiki system that can be very easily bent to your needs, and is used in planner.el, and
-There is a product called remember.el that will keep track of anything you want, and allows easy reviewing of when and where and what you wanted to note down about your information.
-There is a database system built with emacs lisp called EDB available here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mernst/software/edb/ and it is excellent. It is extensively and clearly documented, and is very easy to use.
There are many interfaces to existing database languages using emacs front ends, and there are many more available in common lisp, which u can use in emacs. The cygwin link gets you the most unixlike environment available for win-vistasux-doze to run your emacs in and is very easy to install and maintain, but there is another emacs for win32 built in the-land-of-the-lost(windows) without cygwin, here: http://www.neuralwiki.org/index.php?title=Installing_EMACS

I actually have a child in the target group, so I downloaded the game to check it out.

Game-wise, it's nothing special. It's a flash based game with limited user interaction, less than exceptional graphical content, and it plays at 800x600 regardless of your resolution - no full screen capability. In their defense, most games targetting my kids show the same properties.

In the five minutes I played, I was able to click maybe 4 times, with the remainder of the time spent listening to the characters walk me through the game. The general idea they are trying to get across - building conflict resolution skills - is very apparent. I think my child will enjoy this game - although I think she won't choose it very often over other games that she has available such as Dora or Care Bears titles. Frankly, I think the commercial titles offer a much more clear educational experience, but that's not to say I don't like the game at all.

Personally - I think community developed games like those built with Scratch have a much brighter future. Lord knows how many tax dollars were spent on this game, and if you had 5 involved parents working together for a month and a half, you could have something much better and more open to derivative updates.

Scratch is still flash, but at least you have the ability to update games developed with it - and tailor them to your specific needs/target audience.

I took a very cool graduate-level class at MIT from Dr. Michael Ernst about this very subject. Check out some of the projects listed at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/pag/.

I took a very cool graduate-level class at MIT from Dr. Michael Ernst about this very subject. Check out some of the projects listed at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/pag/.

Hehe...

How true. Another example of people in computer vision with no ideas who are stealing from people who don't sell themselves well enough. What a sad subject computer vision has become. See Adam Kropps paper with Seth Teller here on spherical mosaics.

http://uniset.ca/terr/news/lat_fbibreakin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAPP
http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046/sr=8-1/qid=1172469926/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3962904-3664448?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://code.google.com/p/torchat/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Shah's_Men
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_Fire_Decree
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/iron.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Rule_Book
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeal_of_prohibition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writeprint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
http://www.eff.org/testyourisp/pcapdiff/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/COPLINK/
http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/research/coplink/authorship.htm
http://www.coplink.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/idemix/
http://packetstormsecurity.nl/filedesc/Practical_Onion_Hacking.pdf.html
http://www.williamson-labs.com/laser-mic.htm
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/privacy-sigir2006.pdf
http://freehaven.net/anonbib/topic.html#Anonymous_20communication
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html

here at MIT, we have a fabled set of mailing lists which everyone uses for passing unwanted stuff around -- not just tech: furniture, books, etc. it's called reuse - http://web.mit.edu/reuse/ it's really a good system!

Reference

Note that this study fails to consider whether the shiny side goes on the outside or the inside, and also does not explore the use of true tin foil as opposed to aluminum foil.

To steer the topic back to technical rather than emotional content, here More related links:

Probably one of the more interesting ideas:

Ballast-Free Ship to Combat Aquatic Life
http://michigantoday.umich.edu/2008/apr/ballast.php

And others:

http://massbay.mit.edu/resources/pdf/NABSdatasheet.pdf

Using pier-side bottles to collect ship ballast water
http://www.seagrant.noaa.gov/newsevents/stories/Ballast_water_battles.html

UV Disinfection Method
http://www.triangularwave.com/a3b.htm

Prof Walter Lewin at MIT has some entertaining lectures online as well at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFall1999/CourseHome/index.htm. Great image of consercation of mechanical energy on the opening page.

Wait, you're saying that the MIT summer vision project wasn't as easy as people thought?

(Background: In 1966, some MIT computer science faculty thought AI was so easy that computer vision could be solved in one summer worth of work; it probably took 35 years to reach the milestones identified in the research abstract).

Well, it's rare that a viola was actually used for something good. Cue the viola jokes:

What's the difference between a viola and an onion?

No one cries when you cut up a viola.

I was wondering if anyone else caught that fusion stuff.

From here:
"For his doctoral work, Dietrich is researching inertial electrostatic confinement fusion ..."

Okay, he built a fusor. Smart, but other kids have done that too.

"... for spacecraft power and propulsion ..."

Okay, fusion powered spacecraft. You've got my attention now. Go on.

" ... under Dr. Raymond J. Sedwick, a principal research scientist at MIT's Space Systems Lab. This opportunity stemmed from an efficiency improvement design Dietrich patented for a desktop-sized Penning Fusion Reactor ..."

Efficient enough to finally make break even power or better?

"... following a research internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2002. Dietrich credits this internship with sparking his initial curiosity about a distributed network of reactors that could potentially supplant the United States' strained power grid system."

Forget the flying cars, man! Get back on the fusion stuff. We needed that like, yesterday.

Here goes some useful links to electronics resources in the web:

Mag Lab Education - Electricity and Magnetism: A to Z

Make Magazine - all about hobbyst stuff - try searching here for "multimeter", or "soldering", or "PCB"...

Microelectronics Videos - very good videos about microelectronics and fiber optics

UVA Virtual Lab - Amazing multimedia resources covering many aspects of electricity and magnetism

ePanorama - practical projects, texts, tutorials, and many more...

MIT OpenCourseWare - if you want to go really deep in theory...

anyone wants to complete this list???

I dont' know about books, but this course at MIT covers pretty much all that, although it goes from the hardware level to the software level. All the lecture notes are posted, and one of the labs of the course is actually designing a processor (It's 'built' in a software simulation, so that you can actually see if it works).

The tone is a little on the harsh side; however, the conclusion is not without merit. I first ran into this approach through MIT's oxygen project. The idea here is that the cognitive barrier to using computers is mostly with the input devices. In other words, the keyboard and the mouse is too foreign a concept for most folks here in the real world.

Perhaps this approach has merit for ubiquitous computing. Yes, it does take some training to use a keyboard and a mouse. So what? I think that most humans are smart enough to be trained. Look at cars. It takes training to drive car and cars are ubiquitous.

Project oxygen is not all about input devices. With traditional computers, you have to get really clear about what it is that you want done and to reduce that to a series of operand (make a selection) and operator (choose a menu) tasks. Again, with a little training this is easy.

...is almost universally eye-roll-inducing or rant inducing by most MIT grads. I met one Media Lab student whose thesis was about a stuffed animal that would move/make noises when someone you knew entered their office, and if you entered yours, it'd make other people's stuffed animals move and make noises. So instead of seeing your coworker's buddy icon go from idle to active, you have to remember that your monkey going "eeeeep" means Bob is back, and "ack" means Jane is back. Annoying, distracting, hard to associate, and not able to scale very well.

Yeah. Fucking stuffed monkeys got her a masters degree. From MIT. Hear that sound? Its the sound of people wiping their asses with MIT diplomas and flushing them down the toilet.

Threads aren't the problem. It's the retarded programmer that hasn't a clue as to how to use them that is the problem. It's like blaming guns for people shooting each other.

Want threads to be safe? How about having enough grey matter to protect shared vars, etc with a mutex/semaphore/etc. Or how about making a thread only variable (man pthread_key_create, pthread_[get,set]specific). Hell, how about the crazy idea of keeping track of ones data flow.

This sort of ridiculous thinking is only keeping us from getting the power out of our machines that we could. It's time people suck it up and learn to deal with REALITY. Multi-core/Multi-processor machines are only getting more so. To ignore that is just plain profound stupidity. Stop complaining and just learn how to do it.

Well, at least there are some people out there that know how to think:

http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/

No, but you could (not necessary should, but COULD) require them to respond in some way to basic HTTP requests on TCP port 80 that would identify the domain and the function it is supposed to be performing.

For example, http://rtfm.mit.edu/ puts up a static-content page that tells you what the site is for, even though it's meant to be an ftp repository for usenet FAQs (I realize that rtfm.mit.edu is not actually a domain name, and also that there's really no reason not to have a web interface for something like that in 2008, but that's not really the point I'm making so lay off, all right?).

MIT has an Open Courseware project that "shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1800 courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum." : http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

There is a very nice logo port called StarLogo TNG from MIT which has a VERY graphical programming model (you make the programs attaching graphic blocks representing different instructions).

The idea is pretty neat and Logo was the first programming language I used (and in fact the first time I used a computer when I was 7 years old :) )

Scratch is not free software. The licence doesn't allow commercial usage of the code.

Website is here. It's a different approach to teaching programming fundamentals to kids, somewhat akin to the concept behind LOGO.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4153415/Ubuntu_8.04_Hardy_Heron_-_Desktop_i386.4153415.TPB.torrent http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirrors.rit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://ubuntu.media.mit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://banner.uits.indiana.edu/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso ----- Features: http://techwatch.reviewk.com/2008/04/ubuntu-hardy-heron-8-04-2/

The server was overloaded; it's back up now, but in case it becomes unstable again... Cached lists of mirrors (for all versions):

        * http://www.ubuntu.com.nyud.net/getubuntu/downloadmirrors
        * http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubuntu.com%2Fgetubuntu%2Fdownloadmirrors

Torrent for 8.04 desktop version i386 ISO:

        * http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
        * http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4153415/Ubuntu_8.04_Hardy_Heron_-_Desktop_i386.4153415.TPB.torrent
            (Piratebay mirror because official tracker is unstable)

Direct links to 8.04 desktop version i386 ISOs:

        * http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirrors.rit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://ubuntu.media.mit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://banner.uits.indiana.edu/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso

Encrypting in hardware rather than software has some security advantages. Keys can be kept out of main memory, preventing cold boot attacks which have been used to break Linux's software encryption. Also, software encryption can be more vulnerable to side channel attacks such as cache timing attacks which have also been successful against dm-crypt.

This is a good start: http://web.mit.edu/lienhard/www/ahtt.html

I would recommend the work of Robert T. Pennock who has written a well-reasoned book on Intelligent Deisgn and it's nonscientific nature. He does so as someone who takes both science and religion seriously rather than dismissing it out of hand he makes a clear refutation of the theory argumebnts.

Yes, but the OP's choice of universities is mildly amusing to say the least.

MIT blows its own horn very loudly. Hell, they do a better job of marketing and hyping themselves than Apple do.

The Media Lab might not produce a great deal of "legitimate" scientific output, but it does a fantastic job of capturing the imagination of the public.

Their magazine also serves as a fantastic vehicle for bolstering their own reputation.

This isn't all necessarily a bad thing, although you've got to acknowledge that most of the "top" universities owe much of reputations by shrewdly marketing themselves to the people providing the research grants.

In fact, right here: http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/

That was the first Ariene V flight. Wikipedia has an article and the accident report is here.

Basically, the error was an integer overflow in code reused from the Ariene IV for which the range check had been deliberately eliminated as a performance measure since (in the Ariene IV) it could not overflow. That assumption is not valid for the Ariene V.

To add insult to injury, the functionality provided by the component is not needed at or after liftoff, so could safely have been disabled at that time. Further, the original reason for the function was to allow, in older Ariene models, for the ability to suspend the launch sequence at or after -9 seconds and resume without having to redo some steps.

The lesson is that code cannot save one from a wrong design (although bad code can ruin a good design).

as for the alcohol bit, i tend to think that, with alcohol and smoking, both do NOT get outlawed only because of the vested business interest and traditional practice of consuming it. I do think that it should be outlawed (at least to some degree).

In the US alcohol was outlawed but it didn't work, and neither does the War On Drugs. Before Prohibition a major source of funding for government was taxes on alcohol and tobacco, but with Prohibition the income tax became the major funding. As for consumption of marijuana, hemp, it enjoyed wide consumption though not by smoking it. Prior to hemp being made illegal via the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 it was used in different commercial, industrial, and medical applications. A pack of lies was told to congress, such as marijuana made users violent, in order to get them to outlaw hemp. Hemp was a source of biomass, cellulose, for making plastic. Henry Ford build an auto on his Iron Mountain Estate that not only used plastic made from hemp but was also fueled with alcohol made from hemp. Now research is going on for Bioplastic. Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed his engine to run on biodiesel, fuel made from the oil of plants like vegetables. Among those he used was peanut and hemp oil. Biodiesel is relatively easy to make, only needing vegetable oil and lye as the consumables though Diesel used straight oil. In the mid 1930s MIT published a study that concluded an acre of hemp produced more fiber for making paper than an acre of forest. MIT says of hemp "Hemp has been one of the most significant crops for mankind up until this last century." Thomas Jefferson may of wrote the "Declaration on Dependence" on hemp paper. Whether he did or not he was a farmer who grew hemp on the farm. And doctors used hemp as a drug treatment. Hemp seeds are also one of the highest nutritional foods. Hemp is also an excellent fiber source to make cloth from. The painter's canvas originally was made from cannabis, hemp.

As for outlawing any drug, whether alcohol, marijuana, or anything else, I disagree with all such laws. The only things that should be outlawed are things that harm others. There should be no victimless crimes! And someone drinking alcohol and or smoking marijuana in their living room isn't harming anyone else, except children who have to breath the smoke, in which case the smoker can step outside.

as for the alcohol bit, i tend to think that, with alcohol and smoking, both do NOT get outlawed only because of the vested business interest and traditional practice of consuming it. I do think that it should be outlawed (at least to some degree).

In the US alcohol was outlawed but it didn't work, and neither does the War On Drugs. Before Prohibition a major source of funding for government was taxes on alcohol and tobacco, but with Prohibition the income tax became the major funding. As for consumption of marijuana, hemp, it enjoyed wide consumption though not by smoking it. Prior to hemp being made illegal via the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 it was used in different commercial, industrial, and medical applications. A pack of lies was told to congress, such as marijuana made users violent, in order to get them to outlaw hemp. Hemp was a source of biomass, cellulose, for making plastic. Henry Ford build an auto on his Iron Mountain Estate that not only used plastic made from hemp but was also fueled with alcohol made from hemp. Now research is going on for Bioplastic. Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed his engine to run on biodiesel, fuel made from the oil of plants like vegetables. Among those he used was peanut and hemp oil. Biodiesel is relatively easy to make, only needing vegetable oil and lye as the consumables though Diesel used straight oil. In the mid 1930s MIT published a study that concluded an acre of hemp produced more fiber for making paper than an acre of forest. MIT says of hemp "Hemp has been one of the most significant crops for mankind up until this last century." Thomas Jefferson may of wrote the "Declaration on Dependence" on hemp paper. Whether he did or not he was a farmer who grew hemp on the farm. And doctors used hemp as a drug treatment. Hemp seeds are also one of the highest nutritional foods. Hemp is also an excellent fiber source to make cloth from. The painter's canvas originally was made from cannabis, hemp.

As for outlawing any drug, whether alcohol, marijuana, or anything else, I disagree with all such laws. The only things that should be outlawed are things that harm others. There should be no victimless crimes! And someone drinking alcohol and or smoking marijuana in their living room isn't harming anyone else, except children who have to breath the smoke, in which case the smoker can step outside.

You know that's not what I meant by edge effects. In raster based systems collision points create areas where the proper pixel to display is indeterminate. That's the basic cost of rasterization and one reason why it will always look fake. An animated picture of a wave lapping a hull is never going to look like a model of a wave lapping a hull no matter what you do to refine your raster model.

Very cryptic statement. You do mean the visual artifacts introduced by tesselating curved surfaces, for example? Unless you use parametric representations of the wave and the hull, raytracing will look "fake" as well. Again, this has nothing to do with the renderin approach, and everything with the simple fact that tesselation into triangles is prone to visible errors, especially in curved areas. Note that most, if not all real-time raytracers in existence use triangles only. Branching caused by switching primitive type is not good for performance and the cache..

Others have pointed out that photorealism isn't always the goal. That's true, but ray is also capable of doing the cartoony things without the issues you see with raster.

What issues? As said, the actual raytracing benefits all come from the secondary rays. Where do you need secondary rays in a comic/cartoon-style rendering? Even RT shadows aren't necessary for this style.

One person mentioned that John Carmack prefers raster. That may be. It also may be that John Carmack is a really smart guy and isn't going to tell you what he's up to until he releases the Carmack Ray Game Engine (R)(tm)(really cool).

Unlikely. He has revealed details about his engines in the past, and he won't change this now. Remember all this megatexture newsreel? Doom3 shading? Carmack isn't the kind of guy that likes to hide everything behind NDAs.

One major benefit of ray is that it's embarassingly parallel. Performance scales linearly across multiple cores. Each core does not have to be very fast -- its load just has to be no more rays than it can handle in each refresh cycle. Multiplying cores does not increase latency.

Rasterization too is embarassingly parallel, no wins here. Check out this presentation from Tim Sweeney if you don't believe me. A 8800 GTX uses 128 shaders at the same time. In addition, rasterization is MUCH easier to parallelize because it involves no spatial data structure necessary for ray-geometry intersection tests. In fact, these tests aren't required at all - all a rasterizer has to do is linear interpolation of data across triangles projected on screen. This is what makes rasterization trivially cache friendly. Cache coherence is a major problem with raytracing and one of the showstoppers for real-time RT - because caching is extremely important for the scene and shading complexity we deal with nowadays.

Current raster models require maximum clocks for each GPU for good results. This is a problem because for a given GPU architecture power dissipation as a function of clock speed is definitely non-linear. This means that at some point your triple core per card, 3 card GPU system is going to require 1200 Watts at least and all of the requisite cooling, noise and physical volume required to serve that issue. OTOH, 1024 250mW cores only take 250 Watts.

And let's not forget about the fact that there might be other uses for a system with 1024 microcores that would help drive up demand and help hit the economy of scale metrics that make such a thing profitable.

AGAIN: GPUs ARE massively parallelized. Do you *really* think clock speed is everything on a GPU? Also, 1024 microcores will be useless for 98% of a typical PC's tasks. Synchronization issues will kill off the use of so many cores for gaining performance. Besides, a RT card would require high clock frequencies as wel

Many puzzles have been shown to effectively be nondeterministic computers. E.g., you can make a sliding-block puzzle that is solvable if and only if a given traditional computation succeeds.

Science News story:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020817/bob10.asp

Personal plug:

Games, Puzzles, and Computation

MIT thinks so too. My son's been enjoying it since he turned 2. Of course, his sophistication level is not the same as a 7-year-old, but he enjoys it and is catching on just fine (he's 3 now.)

Richard Stallman points out how this works, and the specific value of cross-licensing, in his talk on "The Danger of Software Patents" or "Software Patents—Barriers to development". He's given this talk many times and recordings and transcripts are readily available (thanks to all you recorders and transcribers). He references an article in "Think" magazine, #5, 1990 (IBM's promotional magazine) which says that IBM gets "perhaps an order of magnitude" more value from cross-licensing than they do from licensing patents they own. The linked article quoting "Think" and the points raised there are well worth reading in their entirety—for IBM (the world's largest patent holder for many years running, by the way, thus compared to IBM everyone is "little") the trouble software patents create is hypothetical, for everyone else (including users) it's very real.

6.170 is the E.E. design course, which in the mid 80's meant creating hardware instantiated Robotron or centipede etc. 6.070 is the C.S. design course.

6.070J Electronics Project Laboratory

Introduction to electronics test equipment such as oscilloscopes, meters (voltage, resistance inductance, capacitance, etc.), and signal generators. Emphasizes individual instruction and development of skills, such as soldering, assembly, and troubleshooting. [...] Intended for students without a previous background in electronics....

6.170 Laboratory in Software Engineering

Introduces concepts and techniques relevant to the production of large software systems. [...] Topics: modularity; specification; data abstraction; object modeling; design patterns; and testing. Several programming projects of varying size undertaken by students working individually and in groups.

This of course is your traditional Software Engineering course as that phrase is known in the industry. Was taught in CLU when I first learned about it and was changed to Java at some appropriate point. Will not be offered as such in the future, but that may be OK with 6.001 material being distributed into 6.01 and maybe 6.02 plus 6.005, and 6.005 being rounded out with more traditional Software Engineering material. I can see a new 6.17x that does a bit more SE plus the projects.

It's worth 12 Engineering Design Points, and MIT EECS for as long as I've known it (late '80s) has had a major philosophical difference with the accreditation organization for it. EECS does not believe you can teach design per se, it must be in the context of actually designing things. So each accreditation cycle the department shows that for each major, the required subjects accumulate enough design work. So one way or another the projects of 6.170 or the like will be replicated in what replaces it.

Hmmm, maybe they'll provide a wider range of domains? Once nice thing about the two new core courses is that they along with 6.004 (which will be retained although slimmed down to 12 units as I recall) will set up a graduate for a embedded career very nicely. That's damned good, since if you want to stay a salaried programmer that's about the only safe domain past age 35-40. Not everyone wants to start a business or become a consultant (or a manager :-) when the conventional programming career path is over....

I guess this is time to repost that story about the billion-watt light bulb.

http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/humor/billion-watt-light-bulb

http://web.mit.edu/olh/Rules/

I'm not an MIT student so perhaps one of them will come up a more inclusive document that states the TOS in using their network.

http://web.mit.edu/olh/Rules/#rule_4
All in all, what I saw when I read through that was that it DID not say whether or not MIT would surrender any information in case of a lawsuit against the network.

http://web.mit.edu/olh/Rules/

I'm not an MIT student so perhaps one of them will come up a more inclusive document that states the TOS in using their network.

http://web.mit.edu/olh/Rules/#rule_4
All in all, what I saw when I read through that was that it DID not say whether or not MIT would surrender any information in case of a lawsuit against the network.

MIT OCW

There's a course on this sorta thing from 5 years ago...

It's a matter of these multi-core "general purpose" CPUs are only really useful for a fairly limited set of specific problems.

Found this on the mcom links page: gopher://sipb.mit.edu/

You know, to the untrained eye that PDF would appear to have been auto-generated by this.